Seattle University wants every student to vote

With just four days left before the state’s voter registration deadline, Seattle University announced an ambitious plan Wednesday.

The university wants every student to register to vote, and they’ve got volunteers pounding the pavement with that goal in mind.

Oct. 4 is the deadline for most voter registration in Washington, though local voters can register in person at the King County Elections office in Renton until Oct. 20.

SU’s 100-percent goal is attributed to President Stephen Sundborg, who was apparently inspired by a theater performance set to open on the college campus this weekend. The play, titled “The UnRegistered: A 2008 Election Cabaret,” was coordinated by a theater class and inspired by roughly 90 interviews with residents of the Capitol Hill and First Hill neighborhoods. (Performances are free and on Oct. 2, 3 and 4 at 8 p.m. at the Lee Center for the Arts, located at 901 12th Ave.)

Now the university is posting fliers, sending voter registration information to residence halls, buying ads in the student paper and setting up registration tables throughout the campus.

“I’d like to get 100 percent of the students registered and then 100 percent actually voting,” said Sundborg in a statement. “This is about teaching our students to exercise their rights and responsibilities as citizens, especially with the upcoming historic elections.”

I was at SU yesterday with a group of voter-registration activists from “Your Revolution” — read that story here — and finding a student who wasn’t registered to vote proved to be pretty tough.

The folks from “Your Revolution,” a voter registration application on Facebook, weren’t too surprised that they weren’t getting many takers. They said they’d heard the SU campus has a high voter-participation rate.

“Ideally, we’d like everyone to already be registered,” one “Your Revolution” staffer said.